Automation will have a bigger impact on jobs in smaller cities

The robot takeover will start in the smaller cities. Towns and small cities have a smaller proportion of jobs that will be resilient to automation than larger urban centres, according to a new study.

By looking at the jobs that are most susceptible to automation and their distribution across different US cities, Iyad Rahwan at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab and his team have found a trend between the size of a city and the impact we should expect artificial intelligence and robots to have on human workers. Roughly speaking, cities with fewer than 100,000 inhabitants are more at risk.

The East Coast cities are full of jobs that should be resilient to automation. Washington DC, for example, has many government-related roles that are hard to automate, and New York, with its population of 8.5 million, is able to support many specialist jobs too.

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On the other hand, in Madera County in California – a wine-growing area with a population of just 60,000 – many of the agricultural jobs can be done by machines. Nearby San Francisco with a population of 850,000 will be resilient due to its size and thanks to being a centre of innovation.

Gambling on the future

That’s the overall trend, but there are, of course, outliers. Las Vegas is relatively large, having about 600,000 residents, but its economy is very dependent on the gambling industry, much of which will probably be automated. Another exception is Boulder in Colorado, a small city with some 100,000 residents. It should be resilient to automation because, like San Francisco, it is home to many start-up companies.

“We shouldn’t be alarmist,” says Rahwan. “We shouldn’t think that automation will mean massive unemployment, but there will be some kind of a shock.” The impact may lead to retraining, migration or new types of jobs, not simply unemployment.

One example from history is the impact that the invention of the ATM had on bank tellers. Initially people thought bank tellers would disappear, but actually their numbers increased. ATMs meant it was cheaper to open new branches, and staff could focus on customer service instead of counting cash.

Much of the recent hype around automation comes from a study from the University of Oxford in 2013, which asked experts how easy certain jobs would be to automate using artificial intelligence and robotics. The study then extrapolated from this and found that 47 per cent of all US jobs were at “high risk of computerisation”.

Guessing absolute numbers is tricky, because predicting the impact of automation is really just an educated guess. But looking at the relative impact – whether one place is more susceptible than another – can still be revealing.

Hide in middle management

In the new study, Rahwan and his team have found that the types of jobs that are hardest to automate become increasingly prevalent in larger cities. For example, the job of a checkout assistant is relatively easy to automate, and so regardless of a city’s population you would expect the proportion of residents there with that job to remain the same.

But the proportion of people with jobs that rely on analytical, management and organisational skills, such as computer scientists or chemists, increases with city size. Once a city becomes large enough, it can support more technical jobs than smaller cities.

The study adds evidence to the idea that megacities will become even more important, says Lesley Giles at the Work Foundation in London. “Larger cities attract resources, skills and expertise, and this creates a virtuous circle of improvements and growth,” she says.

These findings are also likely to apply in Europe where cities have a similar range of jobs. But some places follow a different model. In China, for example, cities often specialise in one type of product, which could make the influence of automation quite different.

The future effect of automation on jobs is yet to be fully determined, but it looks as if city size will play a part. “For us to survive the tidal wave of automation we need to be able to do more creative work and combine our skills with others in a creative way,” says Rahwan. “Maybe the metropolis is the answer to our fears.”